Arthur Miller Plan

He had a peculiar family life

It is not so surprising that Arthur Miller, who married the feminine icon of his time and had that same marriage dissolve on a movie set shortly before her death, would have had his fair share of domestic turbulence. His son Daniel, born to him and his wife, the photographer Inge Morath, in the '60s, had Down syndrome. Miller insisted on giving the child up to state care facilities, in part to preserve happiness for his beloved daughter, Rebecca, and for further reasons of a deeply pathological character. The extent of the drama was examined in a lengthy Vanity Fair feature shortly after the author's death. His daughter Rebecca, for that matter, is a successful independent filmmaker who met her husband, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, on the set of the film adaption of her father’s play, The Crucible. All four of Arthur Miller's children, per his will, received an equal share of his estate.
 Miller wrote a celebrated essay in support of the ‘common man’ as a subject for tragedy. In response to negative reviews which his play Death of a Salesman received, Miller wrote ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’ (1949), in which he argued that modern tragedy in the theatre should not concern kings and queens but ordinary people and their ordinary lives.
. Miller was famously married to Marilyn Monroe, and wrote the screenplay for her last film. Miller and Monroe had initially met in 1951 and had a brief affair, but in June 1956 Miller left his first wife and promptly married Monroe. He wrote the script for The Misfits, which was released in 1961 and starred his wife. During the production of the film their marriage fell apart. Monroe was dead a year later. The film was something of a poison chalice for one of its other stars, too: Clark Gable, who played the male lead, suffered a heart attack two days after completing the film, and died ten days later. The Hollywood connections don’t end there: Miller’s son-in-law is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
 The first production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible received hostile reviews. Despite its status as a twentieth-century classic of American theatre, and one of Miller’s best-known plays, the original run of The Crucible was in fact a critical flop when it premiered in January 1953. Even Miller didn’t like it. It was only the following year, when a more appropriate production of the play was put on, that it became a success. The play, of course, takes as its focus the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, which are used allegorically to comment on the McCarthy anti-Communist ‘witch hunts’ in the US in the 1950s. (The Crucible proved oddly prescient of Miller’s own experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee: in 1956 he would fall foul of the Committee when he refused to identify the other people who had been present at meetings he had attended.) Miller’s original title for the play was Those Unfamiliar Spirits.